1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus which allows a user to freely edit the table describing the data in correspondence to its heading using a mapping which is a set of pairs and each pair consists of H and D where H is a set of headings and D is data which corresponds to the headings.
2. Description of the Related Art
In these years, the table generating function is essential for the document processing apparatus. In a simplified apparatus of the related art, a user draws ruled lines with a segment of ruled line and arranges a text data to each cell of the divided table.
In this apparatus, since the ruled line is not isolated from the text in the cell, it is inevitable that redrawing of ruled line and edition of text in the cell are often generated at the time of edition of the table and thereby a user has expended useless time.
In regard to the table edition, following has respectively been known as a typical apparatus described in the Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. SHO 59-57326 in which the continuous regions in the vertical and horizontal directions (namely, rows and columns) divided during formation of the table are processed as one group and moving and deletion are conducted in unit of this region, the apparatus described in the Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. HEI 2-236773 in which when a couple of cells are selected, contents of these two cells are replaced with each other, and the apparatus described in the Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. HEI 2-289057 in which a table as a whole are structured by sequentially coupling the cells in the tables in one dimension and insertion, copying and deletion of cells are conducted by changing coupling relation of cells in the edition of table.
With the technology explained above, edition in unit of cell, row and column is possible but complicated procedures are required even for a little complicated edition of tables.
For example, when it is attempted to obtain the table shown in FIG. 2 by changing the layout of the table shown in FIG. 1, a remarkable cost will be required for edition because there is no common rows and columns between these two tables and arrangement of texts in the cells is quite different.
The table having the row heading and column heading as shown in FIG. 1 indicates, in place of mere uniform data arrangement on the matrix, the correspondence between set of items belonging to "heading" and items belonging to "data " other than the heading, for example, correspondence between set of items of "Yamagata, Engineering, University" belonging to heading and the item of "Yamagata Engineering University" belonging to the data. Since the table indicates this correspondence, this correspondence is almost stored in the ordinary edition of table, unless the table is changed to the table indicating different data. In actual, layout is certainly different to a large extent but this correspondence is still stored between the table of FIG. 1 and the table of FIG. 2.
However, in the table editing technology of the related art, since any consideration is not taken into account for storing of this correspondence, a user is required to maintain the correspondence in the course of the edition of table and thereby complicated manipulation has been left to a user side.